If you are a Windows user, you may have encountered situations where the system appears to be stuck. Programs do not open at all anymore or very slowly, or you see a dreaded loading animation on the screen that does not go away, no matter how long you wait.
The good old “have you tried turning it off and on again” fixes these kinds of issues often.
Sometimes however, turning off the computer or restarting it is not as easy as it may sound. What if clicking on the Start icon does nothing? While there are numerous ways of turning off the PC, not all are equal.
Note: if nothing works, pressing and holding the power button of the PC will restart the computer eventually.
Emergency Restart in Windows
One of the ways that users tackle an unresponsive PC is by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del. This keyboard combination displays several actions in a fullscreen window.
The main actions are lock, switch user, sign out, and cancel. There is also a power button in the lower right corner, which you may use to restart or shut down the PC.
What many may not know is that there is also an emergency restart option hidden on the screen. All you have to do to activate it is to hold down the Ctrl-key on the keyboard before clicking on the power button.
Instead of displaying the restart and shut down options, Windows shows the emergency restart screen.
Here, you simply click on the ok button to restart the PC immediately.
Windows informs you that any work that has not been saved may be lost during the process. It even warns, rather dramatically, that this should only be used as the last resort.
Closing Words
So, if you run into a situation where the usual options to restart the Windows PC may not work, you could give this emergency restart option a try, provided that you can still get into the Ctrl-Alt-Del interface.
What is your preferred way of restarting or shutting down Windows when things do not work anymore?
Here on Windows 7 : pressing and holding the power button of the PC has been my emergency exit in the very few occasions were the PC was stuck, and that involved the mouse as well but not sure if the keyboard then was on strike as well, in which case I could have tried the famous ‘Ctrl+Alt+Del’ (numeric pad ‘del’ that is), which I’ve been unaware of ever since I started computing… this is confession day 🙂
Yes, IT, turning it off an on again fixed the problem (love the article’s video, still laughing!), except in two circumstances when reboot landed on a BSOD (Win95, Win7) : 2 times in 25 years. Fortunately I could restore with a system disk backup : like “Tora, Tora, Tora”, always “Backup, Backup, Backup”. But that’s out of the scope of the article.
The three finger salute doesn’t always work actually Tom and you’re just faced with a black screen.
But that Ctrl-key + Power button option is worth remembering. Thanks Martin.
Over ups-and-downs in decades–including Win95, WinMe and Vista–been using the 3-finger salute as mentioned.
From quickly opening Task Manager back in the day to what they call “Secure Attention Sequence” now–on my Win10 Pro workstation, where I deem such as indispensable.
First time I heard about this feature, though: So I tried holding down Ctrl-key as I clicked on the power button. That simply sends my desktop to Sleep. From where I could probably wake up, with all hopes, anyway.
So what’s the big difference?
You must be referring to laptops because PC’s have a reset button located right below the power button. That’s my go to solution if the system freezes.
You forgot the other option, unplug it. I didn’t know about this option in the OS though, thanks for sharing. You didn’t secify which version/s of windows though. The screenshot is 11 I believe.
@Tom
Are you forking kidding me? Google “Windows 3 finger salute”. 😉
@Tachy, I promise! Not to mention that confessing untruth would be the ultimate of what a tortuous mind can produce 🙂 I mean, let us lie but at least not with the mask of a confession, right? LOL!
I guess that my ignorance of the Ctrl+Alt+Del feature is a perfect example of learning by necessity, opportunism compared to learning by curiosity beyond immediate necessity. Given I never needed an emergency restart except 2 times over 25 years, even reading articles where it would have been mentioned didn’t make its place in my opportunistic brains, lol!
BUT : now, with this article, why I don’t know : YES, my brains have, I think, I hope, spared a place for the info!
This said, I remain curious in life but when it comes to technology I’ve always unwillingly limited myself to find hence learn on the basis of problems and, to a lesser degree, to improvements : “If it works don’t touch it” could be a credo invented for little old me 🙂
@Tom
I am your opposite. Curiosity, and now privacy too, drives me. I can remember manaully allocating the available 640k of memory so I could get everything possible in there and out of the swap file. My Sis used a memory manager, I beat it!
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When I first got my hands on DOS 3.0 I ran every exe just to see what would happen ;)~
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I once accidentaly zipped my entire C: drive into non existance.
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I’ve crashed every PC I’ve ever owned more than once tinkering with the settings.
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I also like the “If it works, don’t fix it” Credo but …. It’s not working the way I want it to. “Take your paws of my PC, you damn dirty M.$!”